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Mary Oliver |
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At the onset of her career as a poet, Mary Oliver seems almost literally to have followed in the footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose lyrical manner influenced Oliver's early work. Both were "country bred," studied at Vassar, and found an artistic refuge at Provincetown, Massachusetts, combining a love of bohemia with a passion for nature. From the early 1950s, Oliver occasionally stayed at Steepletop, Millay's upstate New York farm, as a friend and assistant to the poet's sister.
Oliver's first poems attempt to achieve a timeless poetic idiom that seems grave and elevated compared to the colloquial and ironic tones often adopted by other "nature poets" such as May Swenson, Maxine Kumin, or Robert Frost. While Christopher Ricks complained that Oliver's first volume of verse displayed "the mannerisms ... but not the genuine unprized talent" of Millay, No Voyage, which was first published in England in 1963, received generous praise from critics such as Carl Johnson, Philip Booth, and James Dickey.
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